Monday, December 6, 2010

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Under pressure, is she not? What a fitting soundtrack for the United States' managed (?) decline.

I would like to believe that just as the British Empire bowed out (and America filled the vacuum) that this transition to a post-American world will come with a whimper and not a bang. Here, vacuums are filled by rising powers, regional hegemons, and other actors. But the decline of the United States is occurring at a moment coterminous with the end of peak oil. The new powers, China and India, have just as much need for these resources as the former big dog on the block. So is a graceful handing off of the reigns even feasible? I would not hold my breath.

Because of the collateral damage caused by the religion of American exceptionalism, some folks may forget that there is a global context for domestic politics. Moreover, one that determines the contours, health, and trajectory of the centuries-long Black Freedom Struggle.

For example, the trans-Atlantic slave trade brought about modernity and linked much of the world together in a forced exchange of cultures, peoples, thoughts, and ideas. The Cold War and the global struggle against Communism, as well as for the "hearts and minds" of Third World peoples, was the context for the Civil Rights Movement and American elites' understanding that Jim Crow was a net liability. The post-Civil Rights moment, globalization, and the end of the Cold War was the stage upon which the managerial class of the United States embraced diversity as a mantra. In that moment it became self-consciously more integrated, all the while the rank and file remained racially segregated.

For a variety of reasons (as this past created our present) it appears that the confluence of events at the nadir of American Empire could be a perfect storm which upsets much of what has been accomplished since the end of the Civil Rights moment.

First, the end of American empire will no doubt impact the intersections of race, politics, and society. Race will continue to over-determine life chances, all the while macro level forces relentlessly impact all Americans across the colorline. Whiteness will remain a buffer. But the breakwaters provided by white skin privilege will be fewer. And we know that Whiteness does not surrender its power easily...

Second, in this time of economic decline, the State will have no choice but to further limit services. The Culture Wars will only be amplified by this practical reality of realpolitik. Consider the following set of circumstances for a moment. Ironically, Red State America Tea-Party GOP country receives more federal monies per capita than any other part of the country--all the while these same anti-government types rail against the nanny-state. Unaware of their own entitlement, these folks are perhaps most sensitive to any change in their share of the federal lucre.

America is becoming more diverse and less white. The Black underclass remains mired in pathology, even while the black middle and professional classes have grown at record rates. Perhaps most damning, the American middle class is being decimated by extreme wealth inequality, outsourcing, flat wages, and a global kleptocracy continues to gain traction by marshaling the misdirected Right-wing populism of the tea bagger set to act against their own economic self-interests.

The racial resentment mined by the Palin Tea Party GOP in the Age of Obama is a signal to these bigger forces. The "us versus them" politics of the New Right is one more data point that the racial heliocentrism of Whiteness, as interchangeable with privilege, and an almost divine right inspired belief in by the birth entry into middle class status, is under siege.

Ultimately, the liberalization of American race relations occurred if not precisely because of economic prosperity, but was most certainly strongly correlated with it. What happens when the apple cart is turned over? When the gravy train dries up? The buffet closed? How soon until the implicit economic privilege of Whiteness becomes explicit race baiting, bigotry and provocation that goes beyond code words, anti-immigrant sentiment, the "real American" nostrums of the Palin Tea Party crowd, neo-secessionist, quasi-polite brown shirts, and evolves into something more naked?

The full piece, "Taking Down America" can be found here. The most frightening scenario (at least to my eyes) is excised and follows:

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain "a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare," and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, U.S. Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand's operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China's People's Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese "malware" seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered U.S. "Vulture" drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 "Fractionated, Free-Flying" satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their "Triple Terminator" missiles at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate U.S. supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of U.S. ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the U.S. Air Force has long called "the ultimate high ground": space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.

Changes are here, and in the now. More changes are coming in the near future.

As signaled to by the change in the graphic at the top of We Are Respectable Negroes, I am moving forward while always acknowledging the core values of this project. And yes, I will break kayfabe a bit more more in the next few weeks and reveal some more details about what the future will hold.

But trust, one, that me Gordon and Zora are still family and they will be around either on a Blogtalk radio show or as guest editors. But also two, that at 1,000 posts (a benchmark that I never would have imagined this fun project reaching in two years), I decided to acknowledge the obvious.

I was seven when my family started driving through the south every year to visit my grandparents in Florida. I remember my sense of wonder at the signs for "White Only" and "Colored" on everything from water fountains to beaches. My father, not perhaps the most enlightened man but well up the scale, made an education of it. He'd pull off the main road and take us through the towns. One time, in a Black neighborhood of some little Georgia backwater, he explained to me why the Black families had nice cars but the houses, not so nice. "The car guys will lend them money, but no bank will give them a mortgage." It was the beginning of my long education in these matters. Much later, married but far from rich, and subject to bad times, my wife and I would sometimes console each other by saying, "it could be worse, we could be Black." We knew that being Black made everything much, much harder. Good for Michelle, speaking truth to power.

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"The car guys will lend them money, but no bank will give them a mortgage."

I love that observation. Black folks may have money. But, we don't have wealth. The penchant of black folks for consumer goods makes sense given how white supremacy punished wealth accrual, but how damning and sad that the ethos of conspicuous consumption in true Freakonomics style continues to hold purchase over too many of the poor, middle, and working classes. And how vulnerable this has made blacks folks and others in this, our Great Recession.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Last weekend we talked about Brothers Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali--two elder Gods whose teachings resonate into the present even though one is passed on and another has learned through fate's cruel irony that sometimes our greatest gift is stolen from us such that we learn to communicate in different ways. Indeed, Crom can be so cruel in his teaching.

Moving forward, the classic fantasy match up for Brother Ali is/was Mike Tyson. While the stuff of barbershop griot exchanges, I never found this fight very compelling. Ali would have destroyed Tyson because the latter, while gifted, never had the ring sense and acumen of the former. And being even more provocative, this fantasy bout would have ended early with Tyson laid out, face down in the fifth round, leveled by the prettiest fighter to ever enter the ring.

The more compelling pairing--at least for this student of the sweet science, that brutal sport of pugilistic beauty--was Mike Tyson versus Jack Johnson. Here the real fight would not be in the squared circle (again Johnson would have easily beaten Ali), but rather in how each embodied different types of impenetrable black masculinity. I would suggest that Jack Johnson, he who put gauze in his trunks to intimidate white fighters, and publicly caroused with many white women when such deeds would mandate him becoming strange fruit both below and above the Macon-Dixon line, was in fact irrepressible and unforgivable blackness that could not be equaled.

Tyson was more a force of nature. While Johnson was born of Jim Crow white supremacy, Iron Mike was a product of Moynihan's sharp observations on the black family, the failures of the neo-liberal order, and post-Fordist economies of scale and deindustrialization.

Both were bad black men and the bugaboos of the white imagination as they embodied the myth of the black rapist--all the while their bodies provided voyeuristic pleasures as simultaneous objects of the white gaze and black triumph in sports (with its obligatory intersections with national manhood).

Mike Tyson was an anti-hero and tragic figure, a symbol for the failures of black masculinity as caricature. Jack Johnson was a hero and trickster figure pushing outward the boundaries of black respectability all in the service of an expanded and more fully evolved black manhood.

Two questions.

Whose blackness is more powerful and compelling? And which figure, Tyson or Johnson was more hero than anti-hero?

I have used a few catch phrases with which to capture my disdain for the Vox Populi and the tea party GOP New Right. I have suggested that "the masses are asses," "stupid people don't know that they are stupid," and that the Right wing populists "hate government but want more government benefits" for themselves. In total, these turns of phrase have been ways of signaling to the long held finding that the American public is largely non-ideological (except in regards to race). Here: they get the big picture more or less. But, the American people are not consistent in their viewpoints. Nor, does the mass public possess a keen and detailed understanding of public policy. Nevertheless, somehow we seem to get it more right than not.

Enter a complication: Let it be transparent that I do sincerely try to give my ideological opposites a fair hearing. To point: Since the election of Barack Obama and the emergent plague that is the birther/Socialist/outside of the tradition of American exceptionalism anti-Obama derangement syndrome, I have found maintaining a fair respect for those on the other side of the political aisle increasingly difficult.

Consider just some of the policies put forth by the Tea Party Republican Party and its representatives:

This week the Tea Party New Right topped themselves when their president suggested that the 17th Amendment should be repealed. Collectively, this is more than a moment where voters and their leadership evidence a lack of expert knowledge on issues of public concern. No, this is stupid put on blast.

Doubly problematic, there is a deep irony at work here that titillates the senses and provokes the mind (how can you not love that Oscar Wilde wordplay? Is it not like wiping your behind with silk?).

The tea baggers worship and fetishize the past. The colonial era of the founding is the tea baggers' political ecstasy, where instead of engaging in group hugs, cuddle parties, and rubbing off the tips of their fingers on concrete or laying prostrate in showers while they orgasm time and time again as their neurons fire uncontrollably, the Tea Party instead chooses to wear Tricorner hats and recite misunderstood passages from Jefferson, Adams, John Jay, and Washington.

How funny that the Tea Party brigands are the very groups that Madison warned us against in The Federalist Papers where: "By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

Hysterical too, that by extension the Tea Party and its leaders call for repealing such laws that ban literacy tests, provide for the direct election of Senators, and remove the property clause for voting that ushered in the all white male franchise. In total, the Tea Party GOP is the Jacksonian mob--all the while this same group supports a return to the very policies that were designed to restrain the excesses of people like them at the time of the founding.

The entitled white working and middle classes are the base of the Tea Party GOP. Fate is not without a sense of humor as this same group of people pursue laws that in spirit could write them out of the polity.

I am always weary of simple, one variable explanations for complex social and political phenomena. But given the data points available, one compelling explanation for the "cut off our nose to spite our face" politics that are intoxicating for the AstroTurf New Right is the following--race still matters.

The detritus of the not aptly named "Greatest Generation" (those same returning veterans which perpetuated Jim Crow segregation and racial violence) that is the New Right, want to turn back the clock in the service of their nostalgic Leave it Beaver Dreams. But, their views on public policy remain profoundly inconsistent...unless one looks at the bigger picture.

Balance the budget, but do not cut our benefits. Keep the goodies for "us" but certainly cut those same benefits for "them." These are the freedom dreams of the herrenvolk masses--the chosen people where the State works for people like us, coloured like me, and who share my beliefs. But the State had best not serve those people over there, because they are "liberals," "immigrants," "gays," "minorities," or somehow "unamerican." These Tea Party AstroTurf patriots pursue policies that are against their immediate and long term economic interests because they sincerely believe that one day they too will be part of the (supposed) meritocratic elite.

History's echoes are indeed deep: The philosophical and political ancestors of the Tea Party GOP are the same secessionist ilk that ran head-forth into the canister rounds of Union guns at hallowed ground battlefields such as Gettysburg. One hundred plus years later, how much things change and yet remain the same...all in the pursuit of the inestimable psychic wages of whiteness.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The proclamation was urged on him by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which asserts that the Confederacy was a crusade for small government and states’ rights. The sesquicentennial, which coincides now with the rise of the Tea Party movement, is providing a new chance for adherents to promote that view.

Jeff Antley, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Heritage Trust, is organizing the secession ball in Charleston and a 10-day re-enactment of the Confederate encampment at Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the war were fired on April 12, 1861. He said these events were not about modern politics but were meant to honor those South Carolinians who signed the state’s ordinance of secession on Dec. 20, 1860, when it became the first state to dissolve its union with the United States.

“We’re celebrating that those 170 people risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government,” Mr. Antley said.

First random thought: Who would've thunk that in the 21st century the Lost Cause would still have purchase and appeal?

Second random thought:It must be my northern Yankee blood that blinds me to the permanent pain of the South's defeat.

For some, this ideology involves play acting in historical reenactments. For others, the Lost Cause is a way to signal to the lost dreams of Jim Crow white supremacy and the "good old days" when black and brown folk knew their "rightful place."

History does political work. As a corollary, memory is a function of power, selective forgetting, and intentional remembering to advance certain ends in the here and now.

It is no coincidence then that the New Right and elements of the Tea Party GOP are deploying the dog whistles of "our America," "state's rights," "nullification," and "intercession" as they attempt to mobilize their largely older, racially resentful, frightened, white victimology possessed, and extremely conservative base. It is also no small coincidence that these factions yearn for a white washed (if not wholly White history) in which America returns to her "founding values."

Not ironically, the symbolism and convenient language of the Lost Cause and the Confederacy are a near perfect fit for the Tea Party GOP and the New Right in the Age of Obama.

Conveniently, the founding values that the Tea Party GOP pledges allegiance to do not include the white supremacy that was the beating heart of the U.S. Constitution--and the ultimate reason for the South's leaving the Union. For the white gaze that is the Lost Cause and New Right, the role and centrality of black folk to American history is a mere inconvenience at best and a footnote at worse. That people of color, and Black Americans in particular, died and struggled to help perfect this country's democracy is an impossible thought, one anathema to the white racial frame and the Tea Party imagination.

I do not know if the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their related ilk are good people or bad. In fact, I could care less. All I want is a little honesty in how American history is taught and remembered. Is it so much to ask that as these (presumably) white folk (and their obligatory token Republican negroes) dance about in period clothing, smiling as they imagine antebellum life in terms of Gone with the Wind on yee old plantation with happy piccaninnies and doting mammies, give some thought to the many thousands dead, the millions of black folk whose full humanity and freedom was denied by the society that the Sons of Confederate Veterans venerate?

I won't disallow the White Soul its pleasure in celebrating Jim Crow and the Confederacy. I can only hope that those who celebrate a centuries long tradition of treason, slavery, rape, exploitation, and death own the blood on their hands. Why? Because a person cannot truly celebrate a thing without taking ownership of all its aspects...good and bad alike.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Never would I have imagined that one day I would write the following: The Walking Dead television series on AMC is too positive and bright--that it problematically keeps hope alive in a way that the original source material never suggested possible.

Like most ghetto nerds, I was excited that The Walking Dead comic book series was going to be adapted for television. I was even more excited that it would be on the esteemed AMC network and helmed by Frank Darabont of Shawshank Redemption fame. But alas, be careful what you wish for, as it may indeed come true. While some are gushing over The Walking Dead television series I have reserved judgment. By nature, I am not a curmudgeon. I also reject the worst tendencies of those residents of snarky nerdville to reject all that the "mainstream" has discovered about our secret loves, rites, and rituals as the bandwagon saddles up, eager to take on any and all passengers.

In practice, I see a broader audience as a pragmatic good that can bring more attention to a given creative property. That caveat now having been noted: The Walking Dead television show is adequate. It is not great. At this very early point, in its surrender to the conventions of television (and perhaps even to the Twilight series soap opera demographic) The Walking Dead has to this point lost so much personality that the show is nothing more than a mere echo of its source material.

For some not so devoted members of the mainstream, the newbies with virgin eyes to the series, that reality is fine...perhaps even preferable. For devotees such as myself, The Walking Dead television series is a lost, great, missed opportunity.

The challenge of divergent forms overshadows The Walking Dead as its approaches next Sunday's season finale. The original material is a comic book. Print media, the graphic novel in particular, allows a reader to digest material at a pace he or she sees fit. As visual story telling with text, comic books are a unique union of words and action. As legends of the graphic arts Scott McCloud and Will Eisner so thoroughly detail, comic books engage the reader by allowing our imaginations to fill in the gaps between panels, provide voices and details to the transitions between scenes, and create meaning where there is only empty space.

In addition, the graphic novel is not limited by the inconveniences of budget or scale: if you can dream it, you can draw it. And most important to our meditations on the questions surrounding what is lost in transition from the page to the screen, comic books are wonderful at communicating action (just consider all that can transpire in a few panels of a comic book's page) and limited by the efficiency of words (how few can generally be written on the page). As different storytelling mediums, television and film do not share these relative limitations.

Frank Darabont and Robert Kirkman have been honest regarding these artistic and practical comprises. To point: Fans of the original medium should allow a broad leeway as the writers and producers of The Walking Dead negotiate the difficult process of translating page to screen. Moreover, fans of the comic should not expect a literal translation as the page is merely inspiration for the AMC series. Nevertheless, The Walking Dead has a beating heart, a set of relationships between the characters, a set of guiding principles, and dare I suggest a personality, that as of Sunday's episode "Wildfire" the series is now woefully lacking.

Thematically, The Walking Dead is about many things. Hope and loss; the pain of a new normal; hopelessness and survival; how real people--you and me--deal with the heretofore unimaginable. Perhaps most importantly, The Walking Dead is about "the walking dead," that (as I and others have written here) in keeping with the conventions of zombie literature the survivors are now the Other, and in Robert Kirkman's award winning comic series, that the survivors are the real and true "walking dead."

Ironically, in the new AMC series where conventions of profitable episodic television melodrama override adherence to the source material, The Walking Dead perhaps ought to more rightly be called "The Walking Living"--two different shows; two different artistic and thematic sensibilities; and the latter not in keeping with the best of what The Walking Dead as a television series could in fact be.

1. Okay. So Merle is going to be The Governor? I like the nice signal to the comic book offered by the amputation of his hand. This is good stuff that mirrors Rick's eventual suffering...and Michonne's revenge. But, the early introduction of Merle as The Governor seems unnecessary as it is a clear telegraph to a substantial future plot development.

2. There is some nice symbolism at work. The American flag, now simultaneously both a symbol of hope and lost dreams is featured prominently in the background of The Walking Dead. In "Wildfire," Jim is dying in the Winnebago--another symbol of the open road, Route 66, and long gone Americana--the flag is a fitting accompaniment to his delusional and dying moments.

3. The Walking Dead comic book has established some pretty good common sense rubrics for survival. The characters maintain a constant watch, are strict with noise discipline, and are mindful of swarms and "herds" of zombies. Where are these common sense rules in the television series? Dale was always perched on top of the RV. Now, that chair it too often vacant. Moreover, the show went to great pains to establish that the blood is toxic. Why then be so careless this week? Hitting bodies in the head with a pickaxe, fluids flying about, and no fear of contamination?

4. The zombie infection is 100 percent fatal. It is also 100 percent communicable. Would you really not immediately kill a person who was bitten? And would you leave said person tied up against a tree, just to reanimate and become a threat? Sorry. Don't buy it.

5. Second melodramatic television concession unnecessarily soap operaesque moment--Andrea holding her dead sister until she reanimates. Foolish. Unbelievable. Insert finger into mouth in order to induce vomiting.

6. Why have a large group of people just to whittle them down to a few key characters? Why the Red Shirt effect in The Walking Dead? Let's cut to the chase and skip the teasing.

8. Second point. Is this bring your kids to zombie Atlanta day? What is the logic here? No one guards the vehicles, all folks exit, and they could be easily surrounded as they try to gain access to the CDC. As zombie lore (and common sense point out) cities are death traps. Avoid them. And if need be, send a small group, not the entirety of your group to what could be a fubar zombie brain eating buffet. This is poor writing that damages the believability of the characters involved...especially Rick and Shane.

9. Two thematic points. First, the device of character gets bitten and we all go to Atlanta to find a cure suggests an adventure of the week model. The writers create a problem, the protagonists go on a quest to reaffirm their humanity to the viewers (and each other) and a problem is overcome...or a new one encountered. I always found this to be tedious, piss poor writing that only exhausts a keen and sharp viewer. Darabont needs to avoid this pitfall. He is better than that.

10. Second point. The Walking Dead comic book is about hopelessness and the unforgiving nature of the real. If there were a cataclysm tomorrow, a pandemic of the type shown in The Walking Dead, you/me/no one is likely to get the big reveal/satisfying answer. Kirkman expertly teased this in the comic book, by having a "scientist," likely the basis of the CDC researcher in tonight's episode suggest a "cure" that turned out to be a lie. Folks, there is no cure. We don't know the disease vector of the zombie plague. There will be no epidemiologist present to conduct a seminar on the zombie apocalypse. Our prime directive is survival. Ultimately, as long time readers of The Walking Dead know, there will be no deus ex machina moment in which all questions are answered.

This sad truth is the beating heart of the comic book series. While I cannot divine the future, if the first season of AMC's version of The Walking Dead ends with a grand reveal of what should remain a MacGuffin, the series will have truly jumped the proverbial shark into mediocrity. In that instance, The Walking Dead will become something quite different from its award winning source material. That my friends, would be a horrible shame.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

"You want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose." What wise words to live by.

There are some heroes that we can not imagine growing older as their flame would diminish tragically for they are meant to burn brightly and in youth. Michael Jackson, a Peter Pan figure, would fit this mold. By contrast, Brother Bruce Lee had much more to teach and the intensity of his flame would have only gained more focus had he not been taken from us so soon.

In which directions would Bruce Lee have grown? What mountains would he have climbed? We can only guess, but as with all of our legends, their early passing provides an opportunity for dreaming and contemplation that only magnifies the greatness present.

Hope your turkey day was good. I also hope you didn't go out and act the fool for some cheap, made in China garbage from Walmart or boutique Target.

Ali's famous speech before the KKK is just a little weekend thinking project for those so inclined.

As I have often shared, Muhammad Ali is one of my few heroes. I love him because of his complexity, not despite it. While Ali is one of the elder gods who I do so admire, I do not lionize him. And yes, there is a difference.

For those who lived through the tumultuous moments of Ali's career as a living, breathing, figure of no small controversy, what are you thoughts about his canonization in the 21st century? For others--and especially for those that watched the Thriller in Manila documentary from which the above clip is taken--how would you respond to those who portray Ali as a bit of an anti-hero--a man whose motives and intent are secular and not divine, a real person, who is capable of both good and bad?

Ultimately, was the greatest really "The Greatest?" Or was he a man who made choices because of his handlers' whims, a consummate pragmatist and performer, a hero who is far less than we imagine him to be?

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

A note for the Sarah Palin Tea bagger GOP cadre members--a white man wrote the following editorial so you know it must be true.

I am and have been transparent in my disdain towards Sarah Palin. She took stupid all the way to the bank; is a succubus of, and lightning rod for, the worst sort of Right-wing populist know-nothing nonsense; and is an expert performer of a particularly noxious type of rural blackface. Apparently, Palin follows through on the New Right's due diligence in her new "book" and includes an obligatory attack on Michelle Obama's patriotism and the then soon to be First Lady of the United States' honest comment that, "for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback"

Michelle Obama was pilloried by the Right for daring to suggest that America had long erred in its treatment of non-whites, and that as an American of color she could now be fully proud because the country seemed to finally be living up to its radically inclusive and democratic potential.

As has been repeatedly demonstrated, the myopia of whiteness knows few limits. The myopic whiteness of Conservativism knows even fewer. As the 2008 presidential campaign reinforced, the White Conservative Soul is wedded to the idea that there is just one American story, one American experience, and one approved nostalgia laden narrative. The realities of white supremacy as foundational to a country where supposedly democratic citizenship was bounded by race (and gender, as well as class) is simply too much to bear.

In short, conservatives need the good lie. It is a tale of a perfect America allows them to sleep easily at night. Unfortunately, not many Americans are afforded that luxury.

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"Attack on Michelle Obama Shows Sarah Palin's Ignorance of History"

By Richard Cohen

When I was 11, my father thought it was time to show my sister and me the nation's capital. I have only vague memories of that trip - the heat, the expanse of the White House's grounds, the Jefferson Memorial. I do remember we took Route 1 through Baltimore (no I-95 yet) and it was there that I saw my first sign with the word "colored" on it - a rooming house, I think. This was 1952, and the United States was an apartheid nation.

It is Sarah Palin who brings back these memories. In her new book, she reportedly takes Michelle Obama to task for her supposedly infamous remark from the 2008 campaign: "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback." Instantly, Republicans pounced. Among the first to do so was Cindy McCain, who said, "I have and always will be proud of my country." It was a cheap shot, but her husband's selection of Palin for the ticket and plenty of cheap shots from Palin ("death panels," etc.) were yet to come.

Michelle Obama quickly explained herself. She was proud of the turnout in the primaries - so many young people, etc. Evan Thomas, writing perceptively in Newsweek, thought - as I did - that she was saying something else. He dug into her senior thesis at Princeton - "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" - to find a young woman who felt, or was made to feel, "more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before." This was not a statement of racism. This was a statement of fact.

It's appalling that Palin and too many others fail to understand that fact - indeed so many facts of American history. They don't offer the slightest hint that they can appreciate the history of the Obama family and that in Michelle's case, her ancestors were slaves - Jim Robinson of South Carolina, her paternal great-great grandfather, being one. Even after they were freed they were consigned to peonage, second-class citizens, forbidden to vote in much of the South, dissuaded from doing so in some of the North, relegated to separate schools, restaurants, churches, hotels, waiting rooms of train stations, the back of the bus, the other side of the tracks, the mortuary, the cemetery and, if whites could manage it, heaven itself.

It was the government that oppressed blacks, enforcing the laws that imprisoned them and hanged them for crimes grave and trivial, whipped them if they bolted for freedom and, in the Civil War, massacred them if they were captured fighting for the North. And yet if African Americans hesitate in embracing the mythical wonderfulness of America, they are accused of racism - of having the gall to know more about their own experience and history than Palin and others think they should.

Why do politicians such as Palin and commentators such as Glenn Beck insist that African Americans go blank on their own history - as blank as apparently Palin and Beck are themselves? Why must they insist that blacks join them in embracing a repellent history that once caused America to go to war with itself? Besides Princeton, Michelle Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law School. It's hardly possible that she is not knowledgeable about the history of African Americans - no Ellis Island for them, immigrants in their colorful native dress waving at the camera. Should she forget it all simply because she went to Ivy League schools - be thankful for what she had gotten and the hell with the rest? Why should she be more grateful than Cindy McCain?

Sarah Palin teases that she might run for president. But she is unqualified - not just in the (let me count the) usual ways, but because she does not know the country. She could not be the president of black America nor of Hispanic America. She knows more about grizzlies than she does about African Americans - and she clearly has more interest in the former than the latter. Did she once just pick up the phone and ask Michelle Obama what she meant by her remark? Did she ask about her background? What it was like at Princeton? What it was like for her parents or her grandparents? I can offer a hint. If they were driving to Washington, they slowed down and stopped where the sign said "colored" - and the irritated Palins of the time angrily hit the horn and went on their way.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

When I was a senior at Hamden High School I was lucky enough to attend a talk by Paul Kennedy, distinguished historian at Yale University, and author of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. Then aged 17, I understood the import of what Dr. Kennedy was sharing. But I was overwhelmed, for in the closing moments of the Cold War I simply could not accept that America, the country of my Top Gun, Red Storm Rising, Red Dawn, Desert Storm first round knockout dreams, would one day not be top dog. Impossible I thought. And most certainly an event that would not occur in my lifetime.

Chalmers Johnson, one of the great teachers and students of global politics, has left us at age 79. Like so few who saw the wicked temptations of American Empire, and how it would one day be undone by virtue of its grand successes, Johnson stated the painfully obvious: Imperial hubris would bring the temple down upon us all.

I do so wish that Chalmers Johnson would have lived a few more years to write the epithet of American empire. To clarify, I do not want to see America's empire collapse for while the little guy did not benefit grandly from the escapades of financiers, global markets, and the military industrial complex (an intentionally provocative point of debate and tete-a-tete for those willing to take the bait), like many, I too remain a bit drunk on our myths of exceptionalism and national triumph where we Americans (with only the most noble of intentions) saved the world for democracy.

Rather, I think we Americans would be well served by the wisdom of the elder gods in this, our moment of seemingly inevitable decline. Chalmers Johnson could hold the collective hand as we Americans walked down our new path together. I do hope the patient has been pronounced prematurely slouching towards her end, that our ingenuity, drive, and spirit will overcome the weight of our ledger. But as a realist, I remain open to any and all possibilities...even the most dire.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

As I said during the 2008 presidential campaign, I prefer my racism straight with no chaser. For this reason, I have often flirted with writing an Op-Ed simply called, "Why Limbaugh, Beck, Gingrich, Palin and the New Right Should Just Call Barack Obama a Nigger and Get It Over With." And yes, I stung myself by writing that dread word for I banned it from the vocabulary some time ago. Ah, the burdens of trying to speak truth to power.

If the New Right Tea Party G.O.P. were honest in their bigotry it would save us all so much time.

In keeping with my love of the old school, there is much to be said for the lack of obfuscation that typified the racism of years past. Black and Brown folk knew the ground upon which their foes stood. By extension, they/we could be prepared for the overhand right and then hit back with a good body blow. In the contemporary, post civil rights, Age of Obama--a world where there is racism without racists--black and brown folk are fighting metaphorical ghosts. Now, the opposition is winning even while shadow boxing.

Trust, those phantom punches can really hurt.

As I did here, I love to share pithy bits of wisdom when (and from wherever) I may find them. Today, I was reading the great book The Gun by C.J. Chivers. This efficient history of modern firearms as told through the lens of the AK-47's development as an indispensable tool of war has a wonderful chapter on the history of machine guns and their role in the coming of age of European and American Imperial power. Of note therein: the following passage on the racism of legendary gun innovator Hiram Maxim which reads as follows.

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His views on race were equally severe. "A black man," he declared, "has no rights that a white man is bound to respect." Late in life, he described belittling blacks in the United States in the service of his early business interests. Before taking a trip to Atlanta in the early 1870s to oversee the installation of one of his automatic gas machines at the grand Kimball House hotel, he bought a photograph of "a New Guinea nigger; it was the niggerest-looking nigger I had ever seen." Maxim thought the picture might charm his Southern hosts. At the time, Pinckney Pinchback, the son of a slave and the slave's master, was serving as governor of Louisiana, to many a white Southerner's dismay. Maxim wrote the words "Governor Pinchback" on the photograph and carried it in his pocket. At moments he deemed convenient, he produced his photograph for his white clients. It was a Maxim calling card, "Whenever we were discussing niggers and politics I used to take out this photograph and hand it to them," he said. What are we coming to, some the men would exclaim. Next we will have a gorilla...

****

Damn, once more, the echoes of history in the Age of Obama both loom and resonate large.

I remain unmoved by arguments against the self-evident truth that much of the opposition against President Obama is rooted in simple, plain, old fashioned, white racism and white victimology. Frankly, some white folks cannot accept the disruption to their cognitive framework caused by having a Black man in The White House. Moreover, it is sadly ironic that the honest words of old school white supremacists such as Maxim would ring true even into the 21st century.

True, a Black man can be elected President in America--an accomplishment of no small note and a momentous beachhead in the long Black Freedom Struggle. But sadly, President Obama is also in many ways bound by the sad and tired remnants of Jim Crow that exist in the hearts and minds of the "traditional, yearning for Leave it Beaver good old days, take back my America" crowd. These knuckledraggers are likely a minority. Perhaps in some crowds, the New Right, Tea Party bigots are a plurality. Yet, there influence on American politics in the aggregate remains out-sized. And the voices willing to stand against them are increasingly mute.

In the immortal words of Bill Cosby: come on people, can't we do better? Or is the United States forever bound by the particular circumstances of its birth, and the powerful influence of an almost guaranteed and de facto White political, social, and economic superiority on the house that race built?

Thursday, November 18, 2010

In the most reductionist and overly simplistic accounts, the military exists merely to kill people and to break things. However, the armed forces are also a location where citizenship is negotiated and claims on justice and belonging are made.

For example, the Irish deeply understood that their transition to full whiteness would be expedited by service in the Union Army during The Civil War. Likewise, Black Americans did not separate "freedom at home" from "freedom abroad." Returning from the killing fields of World War One and World War Two, African American soldiers paid a bloody tax on their full citizenship dues towards a check that was stamped insufficient funds. These deposits into the account of freedom would eventually be cashed, in no small part because of the honorable duty of those brave men and women.

I have long thought that the real stakes at hand in the opposition by Conservatives to our gay brothers and sisters serving openly in the armed forces is prefaced on an understanding that military service is often a pathway to full and equal citizenship in the polity. While these debates are couched in the language of "military readiness" and "unit cohesion," they are ultimately about belonging and citizenship. Some Americans simply do not believe that gay folks ought to be part of our political community. Most certainly, they ought not to be treated equally. In this imaginary, if "those people" openly die in the trenches and battlefields (as they have for centuries), then God forbid those same folk may actually both demand and deserve their full rights as citizens.

I have grown a bit in my thoughts on Don't Ask, Don't Tell. At first, I tolerated the policy and thought it an imperfect solution to a practical dilemma. I bristled at comparisons of Jim Crow segregation in the military to that of the discriminatory practices faced by gay and lesbian soldiers. In my mind, race is not a predilection or orientation that innately predicts anything about human behavior. By contrast, sexuality because of its very nature--a preference for and attraction to some types of bodies--is quintessentially about behavior.

However, over time I came to realize that the logic of segregation in the military was a near mirror for the logic of segregation against gay and lesbian soldiers. Black people were imagined not as individuals where race works as a social fiction made real by law, habit, and tradition. No, in the logic of the Jim Crow, black folk behave differently, are inferior and alien in their life practices, precisely because they are not white. Insert "gay" in place of "black," "straight" in place of "white," and the logic possesses an eerie parallelism.

In modern total warfare any avoidable waste of manpower can only be viewed as material aid to the enemy. Restriction, because of racial theories, of the contribution of any individual to the war effort is a serious waste of human resources.

Be Skeptical About Ready Generalizations

More dangerous than careful experiment is reliance on untested theories. There are many current theories about the Negro can or cannot learn, about what work he can or cannot do, about the likelihood of conflict or cooperation between Negro and white personnel in school or on the job, and about all other questions with which an officer may be faced. All of them should be viewed with skepticism until there is evidence that they have been thoroughly tested under practical conditions as found in the Naval Establishment.

Symbols That Irritate

High or low morale has been said to result from a lot of little things. Among the little things of great importance to Negroes are words, jokes and characterizations which white people use on occasion unthinkingly. They can be such sources of irritation that leadership becomes difficult, and continued use of them has on several occasions invoked serious incidents.

Negroes prefer to be referred to in their individual capacities as Americans without racial designation. The word "nigger" is especially hated and it has no place in the Naval vocabulary. Negroes are suspicious that the pronunciation of the word Negro as though it were spelled "Nigra" may be a sort of genteel compromise between the hated word "nigger" and the preferred term "Negro." The terms "boy," "darkey," "coon," "jig," "uncle," "Negress" and "your people" are also resented. If it is necessary to refer to racial origin, "Negro" and "colored" are the only proper words to use...

****

More than a historical curiosity, this publication signals how far we have come as a country where a black man could a few decades prior be judged not fit for equal service by the mere fact of his skin color, and now a Black man is the Commander in Chief. Ironically, in the 21st century some of the Guide to Command of Negro Naval Personnel's advice could still be benefited from--especially by the New Right, Tea Party, Fox News, race bating scions of white bigotry and racial resentment.

The policy of racial segregation in the U.S. military was a national shame, a stain on this country until it was ended by the Truman administration.

A segregated U.S. military was thrown into the dustbin of history and the United States is long better off because of it. Ultimately, Don't Ask, Don't Tell is long overdue to join the Guide to Command of Negro Naval Personnel as a historical artifact and curio, one best suited for a museum or archive.

As long time followers of WARNNN already know, Brother X-Squared is a potent activist, black futurist, and visionary thinker. His observations and opinions have had explosive power as they draw attention from points far and wide, and all directions on the political compass.

It has been several months since our last conversation with Brother X-Squared. He now returns from his self-imposed exile to offer his opinions on such wide ranging topics as President Barack Obama, the 2011 midterm elections, and the current state of popular culture, arts, and letters.

WARNNN: Hello Brother X-Squared. It has been such a long time since we last spoke. What have you been up to? Where have you been? So much has transpired in these last few months. Our readers have been repeatedly asking as to your whereabouts, and are hungry for your insights.

Brother X-Squared: I see that you are gracious and humble before me. I appreciate that. Oftentimes, you are a bit obstinate and willful Brother Chauncey. Perhaps now you are hungry for my wisdom. Although, because of my absence, I will have to begin slowly and speak like a genius to a child as your mental mind state has become flaccid and your brain incapable of handling my melanin infused genius. I have been off getting ready for the inevitable fall of this wicked country. As I predicted, all of the forces of capitalist witchcraft racist exploitation are finally bringing down this house that race built. The foundation is rotten. A hurricane is coming to cleanse Amerikkka from the Earth! It will be glorious to behold!

WARNNN: Are you that cynical? Is the U.S. really at its end? When will this happen? The date, the year? Please share.

Brother X-Squared: Sorry Brother Chauncey. Knowledge is reserved for those who have earned it. The captive black man in America deserves his fate. Once he comes into full knowledge, the so-called Black American neo-slave will come to Brother X-Squared and the renewed Black Panthers. This is Nubian Darwinism in action. Only the strong survive. I am ready: I have soybeans, hemp, peanuts, mineral water, shea butter, and many volumes of books for when the time is right. What a joke your Obamazombies are! So happy to have a halfrican prince in "charge" as "President." They done pulled the nigger wool over your sleepy eyes. What a beautiful irony. You weak captive negroes cheered "yes, we can!" just as history will remember Obama as the last President of the American Empire. He is your Nero! Lapdog fools.

WARNNN: Are you happy about this?

Brother X-Squared: How does a black coon dog who has just treed a white opossum on the evening before Juneteenth in the middle of a rainstorm feel?

WARNNN: Huh? What are you talking about? Coon dogs? Juneteenth?

Brother X-Squared: Once more, you have no knowledge of your own history, the Africanisms that live in all true Nubians. Pathetic. The answer is yes! Oh yes, I am happy. The 2010 Tea Bagger election is one more nail in the coffin of this racist country. The chickens are coming home to roost and they are going to smother the white devils and their colored supplicants who run this country.

WARNNN: Since you introduced the topic. Please give us more thoughts on the tea party election? What do you think caused it? How does Fox News, and Sarah Palin with her "mamma grizzlies" fit into this puzzle? What could Obama have done to help the Democrats?

Brother X-Squared: So much to explain. This is so simple. The White House is a white house. It was built with slave labor. There is no way for a black man to have justice in this society. Even though Obama is a spiritual zero because his white momma's energy canceled out his hot in the pants African daddy's melanin force, Obama is still a half-negro. He can't escape the force of history! Impossible!

WARNNN: Be careful now, isn't that a bit close to the nonsense on genes, blood, and mystical forces that D'Souza and Gingrich were peddling about Obama and his father?

Brother X-Squared: Caution is for weak negroes such as yourself. D'Souza and Gingrich--two sick and twisted white devils, the former being a coconut who would take that insult as a complement--have no idea about the powers of the Zombi! What we true Africans know to be rooted in Haiti home of the Black radical freedom fighter visionary Toussaint L'Ouverture! Oh yes, a great man who drove out the white devils from his country. The weak white man was afraid of the mystical forces embodied by human black gold they brought to their so-called "new world." Our obeah powers, our Voodoo, our Candomble put a psychic scar on white people. To this day most ofays tremble with fear of the night. So it is natural that when they see a halfrican mulatto--even though his negritude melanin forces are very diluted--like Obama that white folks would be terrified. Thus, their use of atom bombs and fighter planes and machine guns to conquer the world for the white man doesn't have the virility or strength to engage true Nubians and our colored allies in physical, psychic, or intellectual battle!

Ultimately, the leadership of this country is rotten down to its core. The funny thing is, the white devils who run things really only care about green and gold! Money. They get those dumb hillbilly angry white people to put on costumes and run around acting stupid. A diversion from the big plan. Moreover, as some smart white race warriors such as Joe Feagin have pointed out, the white people in this country are delusional, sick with this thing called "the white racial frame." Their minds can't even process or accept that a so-called black man is President. They are losing their damn minds. Imagine if a real Nubian warrior such as Brother X-Squared were in charge. The sex-freak tea bagger crowd would have certainly committed hara-kiri! Mass suicide!

WARNNN: What of Fox News and Sarah Palin?

Brother X-Squared: I love Fox News!

WARNNN: Huh? Are you serious?

Brother X-Squared: Again, you are playing the white man's two dimensional checkers while I am playing that Star Trek 3d chess mixed up with that Star Wars holographic effect. You and the other captive Africans in America will never be free because you don't understand the white man's tricknology. He hides things in plain sight. Right out in the open just like the Russians during the Cold War and those devilish slave traders the British during World War Two. Fox News, Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck are telling you everything they are going to do their enemies. Everyday they give marching orders to their armies. You fools sit around trying to reveal some deeper meaning behind the words of those devils. There is none. That cabal of Caucasian evil believes in eliminationism. They are going to wipe you black and brown fools out and leave some around to be slaves. Watch. You will see.

WARNNN: That is so much hyperbole.

Brother X-Squared: Prove to me that I am wrong. You have a bunch of drug addicted likely pedophiles in Beck and Limbaugh leading a whole revolution of similarly deranged white people and their black and brown overseers. If you can't see what is as plain as that big negro nose on your face, I can't help open your eyes. On that Palin witch. Now, she is dangerous. If you knew your history you would know that most of those fascists like Hitler and the KKK for example, knew how to use the "so called" sacred idea of white women's nobility and purity to motivate white people into killing black and brown people. Think of how many Nubians were hung from trees because some white trash Southern woman cried rape. As though a proud Black man would lay with such a thing, especially given that from slavery on, the white woman would come to the Nubian god for an infusion of melanin life force that her weak-willed husband could not give her. Why take what you can get for free! Oh yes! Riddle me that!

But, there is something truly devious going on with Sarah Palin. Do you see it Brother Chauncey?

Brother X-Squared: You think too much. "Mamma grizzlies" is a perversion! Another signal to the sex deviancy practiced by the tea baggers. These white sick sex perverts have a political movement based on putting one's testicles in the faces of people. They are capable of anything. That mama grizzly mess is a signal to bestiality! Oh yes! These tea bagger white people are sick! It is doubly disgusting because as our indigenous Brown and Red brothers--all high respect do to our allies in the struggle--have taught us the bear is a powerful creature of sacred power! A truly noble creature from Mother Gaia is now debased by the craven likes of Sarah Palin. Palin so hates you black people, even that Uncle Tom Pastor Manning can see it, that she has photos taken with a slave catching net! Oh the evil is so transparent!

WARNNN: Did I tell you how much we missed you? Never, ever, would I have put those pieces together in such a way...

Brother X-Squared: You are a child at the knees of Brother X-Squared, a padawan. I on the other hand am Master Yoda. Next question.

WARNNN:What are your thoughts on Barack Obama and his trip to India?

Brother X-Squared: More greatness. The truth is like an onion, layered, hidden, burning to the eyes of those whose mental nictitating protective membranes are not prepared. Obama is a middle man, he is sent to grovel to the brown peoples of the Earth for money. Uncle Sam, who in reality was a meat salesman before his visage was used to get dumb Americans to go die by the thousands in Europe during World War One, is dead broke. Now he goes around with a begging bowl. So ironic given that brothers like DuBois and those at the Bandung Conference were predicting that the darker races would rule the Earth! Now that moment is finally here. So wondrous to see history unfurl before our very eyes.

Did you know that Obama is likely practicing some type of witchcraft and mysticism while in India?

WARNNN: What are you talking about? Again, that sounds preposterous. He is there to negotiate a trade agreement and to make sure that the U.S. can try to balance China's growth and influence as she rises to superpower status.

Brother X-Squared: It is often the most ignorant who are the most assured in their beliefs. And that is most certainly you and not me in this case...

The Indians are tricky. In fact, they are Aryans--white people! They, like Obama, have a veneer of color on them. But in reality, they, like the captive black man in America, worship whiteness and the British culture! Even in this country the Indians were declared white for purposes of immigration and to be exempt from Jim Crow! How absurd, many of those so-called Indians are darker than most natural born Nubians, but somehow they get called White! Sick.

Thus, Indians can marshal all sorts of wicked powers. Hitler's spiritual guide was an Aryan Indian wannabe. I bet you simple minded black Americans did not know that! You see Chauncey, in Indian there are these people called Death Eaters who are cannibals. They hang around the Ganges and the funeral pyres. Like zombies, they eat the flesh of the dead! That is why Obama is going. He is trying to get some insight and magical powers to help a dying regime and a dead presidency! The truth is there for those who want to see it! Obama is a just a Waka Flocka halfrican walking around dancing for money like a common minstrel or ghetto hoodlum. That is how the world sees him because it is true! No real Nubian warrior would ever be so humiliated.

WARNNN: You are a keen observer of popular culture. I know that in our pre-interview, you were quite upset by the recent Denzel Washington movie Unstoppable.

Brother X-Squared: That movie is foul and hellish. It approaches Transformer 2 levels of white supremacy and evil. I left Unstoppable feeling so dirtied that I had to wash with Shea butter and reapply my sandalwood ointment.

WARNNN: Please share.

Brother X-Squared. The idea of a train out of control is a slap in the face to the natural black man. The Nubian Warrior is the only real train in America! Possessed of such power we drove this country's economy as slaves and now we possess the potential energy that will blow this place off of its foundations! As I said in an earlier interview, Brother X-Squared is the only unstoppable locomotive crushing white people's proverbial cars on the railroad tracks.

What does the white man do with his tricknology? He makes a movie where Denzel Washington, who played Malcolm X, is a slave to some young white boy. The black man drives the train for a racist white engineer--how prophetic, as the white man is a natural engineer of death and destruction--in that Chris Pine who played Captain Kirk, the legendary race mixer in that hellish Star Trek movie. Then Denzel's character risks his life to save a city full of white people! How absurd! Consider the symbolism, Malcolm X dying for white people! How sick.

You saw the movie did you not? Did you like it?

WARNNN: I am afraid to answer. I would admit that it was a fun diversion and...

Brother X-Squared: Shut up. Of course you would like Unstoppable. I do most certainly need to come around more often to right your thinking. The movie has subliminal wickedness as well. The train's number is 777. What should be a lucky number in the Arabic system is made an evil number by white tricknology! The numbers are even colored red, red as in blood and death! That sick Unstoppable near pornographic movie even assaults our beautiful Nubian women. The two queens in the movie are neo-sex slaves who work at Hooters! Showing off their intimate parts while serving fried chicken to obese, greasy, white men as though they were common harlots in massa's bedchamber.

The movie even has a sick, sick image, one so deep that you and those other common negroes must have missed it. Denzel is risking life and limb to save a town full of white people when he should have let that train blow up and kill them all. Such a noble black slave, a magical negro who serves white people in the ways they imagined good slaves to. Who shows up just in time to save the day? A white racist hillbilly driving a red F-150 pickup truck! This is the vehicle white racists drive. They use it to drag black people by ropes until they die! Sick. White supremacy works in such subtle and obvious ways. It truly is the greatest invention of all time.

WARNNN: I have to admit that you ruined a movie I thoroughly enjoyed. Your wisdom is overwhelming at times. Along with your enthusiastic thumbs down for Unstoppable, you also had a movie recommendation to share?

Brother X-Squared: Yes. I loved the comedy Winter's Bone:

WARNNN: I saw that movie. Yes, it is a great film, but it is more of a tragic, noir flavored drama, almost Coen brothersesque in its sensibilities.

Brother X-Squared. Not to me. That movie about those white trash Appalachia hill people was so wondrous. White cave dwellers, the natural state of "the Caucasian" on full display as they kill each other, eat squirrels, and live in utter poverty was a great thing to see. Like that devil klansman Woodrow Wilson said, this movie was like "writing history with lightening." I just purchased Winter's Bone on DVD and will be screening it everyday for my family and children. Oh yes! The white man's natural ways revealed for us all.

WARNNN: As always I am shocked and amazed. Will you please bless us again in the much more near future with your wisdom Brother X-Squared? It really has been too long.

Brother X-Squared: I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am here and everywhere. I will return soon to provide your intellectually drapetomaniac lost negroes more guidance and knowledge of self.

Tips and Support Are Always Welcome

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, as well as online magazines and publications such as The Atlantic, Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.